The interview
Q: What is your name?
I'm Laurent Destailleur, the creator of Dolibarr.
Q: What is your product?
Our product is called Dolibarr, it's an open source ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) & CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software for small businesses. Dolibarr is a community project, it works very well but there is no company or brand behind it.
Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?
Dolicloud is our 100% open source CRM and ERP Cloud-based suite. It is run through a service company offering Dolibarr as SaaS, which means turnkey installations, automatic updates, low cost and full automation of the software service life cycle.
Dolicloud was actually created in an unexpected way. Dolibarr itself exists since 2003 as open source ERP/CRM solution and back then was certainly among the biggest open source projects in the world. I extensively used and tested Dolibarr and eventually created Dolicloud as a SaaS version so others could also benefit from managed Dolibarr instances.
Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?
There are a lot of companies offering Dolibarr services and not using Dolicloud. About 10 companies exist in France, but there are also companies from Spain and South America. We are also beginning to have more and more integrators in Germany. These companies are usually have staff of 30-40 people and can make a living by providing installation and customisation services around Dolibarr. We are actively supporting several of these companies to help consolidate the ecosystem and make it very easy for a client to switch from one Dolibarr provider to another. We're also not working for any bigger groups. Dolibarr is a system for SMEs.
Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? How is your solution different or better than competing solutions?
I believe we were one of the firsts to offer an ERP SaaS at a very reasonable price of 12€/month. Odoo is probably very close to Dolibarr and also almost fully open source, but their cost for almost the same features was more than double (25€/month) and only recently went down to 20€/month.
We also offer complete reversibility, total freedom of data and custom access permission including modifications without losing SaaS support.
Q: What are the strong points of your technology?
Our functional richness that covers the needs of companies from 1 to 50 people thanks to interoperable micro-applications and our functional ergonomics, which mean you need very little time to learn the software and how to customize applications to arrive close to an optimal process without having to invest significant amounts of time and money.
Q: Can you name users or clients of your solution? Preferably in the CAC40, DAX30, Fortune500, European governments?
It is difficult to know exactly what position we have in the market, because of our voluntary refusal of tracking. During installation of Dolibar, there is an option of sending a ping to the Dolibarr association, so we know there are around 150 manual installations per day with customer ticking a checkbox to ping us. In the automatic installer, this option does not exist.
Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?
There is a lot of help and funding in France for SMEs, so I am quite happy with that.
On the downside, we will never reach GAFAM level, because there are no big orders from the State. It should be forbidden for foreign companies to participate in public tenders to give a chance to French and European technology creators. Also, the "war" between open source and proprietary solutions is a burden for our economy and for our sovereignty.
Q: To what extent are the interoperability projects financed by France and Europe likely to guarantee the development of European cloud technologies?
Interoperability is not really a subject for us, since everything is fully open source.
Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?
Since Dolibarr is a stable and mature solution with powerful automation we work today with a single employee who can answer to the requests of 1000+ customers without any problem.
Our operating cost is 0,5€/client/month, which is very low compared to other ERP providers.
Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?
I can't really give you a good example. I am also not really an entrepreneur. There is a lot of growth potential in Dolicloud, since Dolibarr has many features and a satified client base. Going into hypergrowth mode and developing new products is not so desirable for me. I prefer staying in open source and use organic growth from word of mouth.